Hyperthought (7 page)

The woman, our hostess, grunted in monosyllables and scrawled numerals on the gritty floor with her finger. The two men stripped us of our piton guns, our cash, our gear belts, our signet rings—including the ones in my boot—and all of Luc’s silver jewelry. Cher Luc was a bit vain about his jewelry, and he took that hard.

Afterward, they seemed to expect us to join them. The woman conveyed with gestures and a few words of Net English that our valuables would be added to the common treasury. In other words, these renegades had organized themselves like a Transkei health church, sans the exercise equipment and nutrition counselors.

After her little speech, they clamped old-fashioned steel shackles around our ankles—just as a sort of “welcome to the commune” ritual I guess. About then, I noticed some of the men ogling Luc and me and licking their lips. I knew what they were thinking. Scuzz that.

Luc whispered, “Smile, chérie. Stay calm. We still have resources.”

When the village people started picking through our gear, an argument broke out. So much for communal possession. While they were occupied, Luc nudged me and winked. We quietly edged into the shadows. Luc still had one tiny silver pin piercing the only spot on his body the villagers hadn’t searched. He used that to pick the locks of our shackles. The villagers didn’t even notice when we slipped away.

Silent as thieves, we belly-crawled out of the warren, past the glowing seams of plastic caulk into the safety of darkness. Then we huddled in a cranny, and I suggested that the best escape route would be straight up. The villagers wouldn’t expect that. Maybe the Greenland cops had forgotten us by now. Maybe we could get to the seaport. Maybe should have been my middle name. See, I’m a girl who always keeps hoping. What I’ve learned is, when in doubt, make the boldest leap you can think of, and you’ll usually land safe. Not everyone agrees with that, I know. It takes resolve.

Luc didn’t like it, but he finally agreed with me. He always does, eventually. The villagers had taken our chronometers, so I don’t know how many hours we spent working our way back up through the factory levels to where we’d first played merry-go-round with the cops. When we were maybe four levels below Godthaab’s public corridors, we started searching for recognizable landmarks. We needed to get our bearings and find the seaport, but everything looked the same. Mazes of oily blue machinery clanking and whirring, compressing liquids and gases, throwing off heat.

We’d fled the village people with just the clothes on our backs, and we didn’t have a single tool between us to open the food or water pipes. So we dined on black mold, and we drank from oily pools where steam had condensed under the machines—just like when we were kids. But it wasn’t enough. Mes dieux, but I craved a cool drink of water.

In desperation, Luc finally starting yanking at a small plastic water line just where it connected to a pump. When I realized what he was doing, I joined in. We hauled and hauled at it, using our body weight to pull it loose. After several minutes of struggle, the gasket let go, and water blasted out of that little hose like a geyser. I swear by Newton himself, no drink ever tasted better. We were laughing and spraying each other when all of a sudden, we heard a voice. Machine-made. A cyborg.

“Mademoiselle Sauvage?”

Luc and I froze. The plastic water line lashed around on the floor blasting spray, and the machinery kept clanging. “Mademoiselle Sauvage?” the mechanical voice vibrated again.

I looked over my shoulder, and there stood a copper-colored cyborg wearing the uniform of a Greenland cop. Luc bounded to his feet, then slipped in the water and nearly fell. I sprang up and caught his arm.

“Do not fear me,” the cyborg said. “I am Ras. I serve Jin Sura.”

“You—what?”

“To avoid electrocution, please move one meter left,” it said.

Luc and I gawked at the cyborg with open mouths. We were standing in water up to our ankles like a pair of goofy statues. The cyborg pointed, and we looked down to see where the water was just about to spill into an electrical fuse box. As one unit, Luc and I leaped up to a dry platform a meter to the left. A second later, the box scritched and smoked and arced white lightning as water sizzled through its fuses. Close one.

“Jin Sura has sent me to help you,” the cyborg said.

If I had to pick the exact moment when I fell in love, that would be it.

The cyborg explained how Jin had deployed him to find us on the very day we disappeared. Ras had been searching ever since, starting at our lodge and doggedly following our trail. He’d tracked us using a DNA scan based on a few hairs I’d left on Jin’s pillow.

He—Ras, that is—carried a Net node, cash, two fake signet rings, eight liters of water and a supply of those nutrient caps that taste like melted plasticene. He also carried a message, recorded in Jin’s own voice.

“Take care, pretty Jolie. Remember, you’re my witness. I’ll be in touch.”

Ras led us to the seaport through crawl spaces under the factory floors. Four hours of crawling, two hours of sleep, on and off for more cycles than I care to remember. The seaport turned out to be a preter-vicious long way. When we reached the docks, Ras interfaced with a cyborg shipping clerk, who promptly issued us a pair of surfsuits and stowed us away on a hover freighter bound for the south. Five days later, Luc and I were sitting in a public Net stall in Palmertown, Antarctica, breathing the air of freedom.

FEBRUARY IS THE
hottest month is the Antarctic summer, and even though the Palmertown city engineers had all their refrigeration units turned full max, the air reeked with salty human sweat. Laws, that place smelted good to me.

About the first thing I did after we arrived was to download some tracer software to locate Jin. While we waited for the results at a public Net stall, Luc and I surfed the news. And stared at each other in disbelief. The unthinkable had come to pass. Full-out civil war.

Throughout the crowded underground cities of the northern hemisphere, protected workers had risen against their masters. Rebel cells long concealed had blossomed overnight. Bombs exploded in Euro, setting off subterranean fires that raged out of control. Greenland.Com had declared martial law. In the Manhattan Protectorates, production lines had been sabotaged. Looters in Asia prowled the corridors, ransacking without restraint. Nome.Com had released nerve gas in the Alaskan worker dorms. Only the Transkei Free States clustering around the southern pole remained stable.

My tracer program found Jin in Frisco, California. Sacrée Loi! He’d flown straight into the war. California was a protectorate of Nome.Com. And Allistaire Wagstaff, Nome’s despotic CEO, had the worst human rights record on the planet. I couldn’t believe Jin had flown to Dr. Merida’s clinic in the teeth of the war. His action smacked of a death wish.

I sent a videomail to his address and waited for a couple of hours at the public Net stall, but there was no reply. So Luc and I checked into the cheapest lodge we could find, and for the next several days, we considered our options.

So much for Jolie’s Trips. The outbreak of violence in the northern Coms put an end to my entrepreneurial pursuits. As if I cared about that anymore. Every day brought new horror stories and market gyrations. I kept thinking about my friends in Paris. I watched the news every second. Caspar Van Hyeck, the CEO of Greenland.Com, made long windy speeches about peace, while Nome.Com’s Allistaire Wagstaff erupted with bloodthirsty threats. Pacific.Com’s Suradon Sura came on once at twice to denounce the rebels as suicidal fools. Net newscasters raced to air the most graphic violence.

Meanwhile, Uncle Org—the World Trade Organization, our only planetwide governing body—seemed baffled. Uncle Org’s thirty-two satellite-based Artificial Intelligence nodes were simply unable to comprehend the situation. The AIs overloaded the Net with their queries into human history. Maybe they were trying to fathom the purpose of war. Since their creation back in the twenty-first century, Uncle Org had managed Earth’s commerce with order and reason and stable exchange rates. This situation didn’t fit their scenarios.

It was a heady, nervous time in the south. Partisans mounted parades. Speculators ran scams. Southerners discussed the rebellion as if it were a sports contest. And everyone laid bets. A carnival atmosphere prevailed. You could practically taste the adrenaline.

Me, I wandered the bright, cluttered corridors of Palmertown in a daze. My life was in limbo. I didn’t know what to do next. These southerners, most of them, had never been to the north. They didn’t know the people living in the Paris tunnels. They didn’t bite their nails and feel their guts pulled apart every time the Net aired another explosion. Still, how dare they lay bets on this tragedy? I wanted to punch somebody in the face, but I didn’t know where to begin. Luc started drinking too much wine, which was way unlike Luc. Me, I stayed up all hours and bumped into walls.

Out of habit, I checked back every day at the public Net bureau for a reply from Jin. And I kept stopping in the open doors of bars, watching the Net news. What was happening to my friends in Euro? And what, by the Laws, could I do about it? I’m not usually one to hang around idle. I guess I was paralyzed.

The tenth morning, the public Net bureau posted a cryptic, text-only message for me, dated February 24, 2127, from the Merida Institute of Neuroscience.

“To La Sauvage. Boren was right. I can hear myself think. It’s a constant warbling bass note. Rapid changes expected. Wish you were here. J.A.S.”

The message from Jin came as a real relief, more so than I had expected. He was alive, and that gave me hope. I dunk the distance and worry intensified my attachment to him. I sent a vidmail back at once, begging him to get out of there. That word from Jin, and the hope it brought, made something click inside me. After I sent the reply, I didn’t hang around waiting for an answer. I went to find Luc. I was sick of feeling paralyzed. Luc and I both needed to be doing something. And finally, a notion had popped into my head about what needed doing.

If I’d been born with a little more smarts, I never would have tried this idea. Everything was against it. Ça va, I simply didn’t know. My funds were still mostly intact, so first thing, I got Luc sobered up, and we rented a double cube in midtown with room to work. And I painted a sign in glitter-glue on the door: “Euro Rescue Project.” Then I started calling friends.

Luc was too young and innocent to know how impractical my idea was. Luc would follow me anywhere. He bought equipment, built our Net site and started sending global vidmail, trying to reach the protes in Paris.

Jonas Tajor, an old acquaintance and totally brilliant geek living in Perth, Australia, helped a lot. Jonas had long curly hair and coffee black skin and a languid way of talking that calmed my nerves.

“Paris? Easy hack, love. We’ll bounce a relay through the Aussie Fugue. That’s our procession of 720 contrapuntal satellites circling in harmonic low-Earth orbit at 20 degrees to the ecliptic. A true masterwork of southern engineering. Those Norse-arses think they can scramble us out of their hemisphere? Jolie love, we’ll go deep. We’ll go hard. We’ll go wire! We’ll interface with the Transatlantic Cable. You didn’t know that old relic was still there? Electrons rip!”

Sanguine, that’s how Jonas made me feel. He tapped into pirate Net bands and sent queries to the Euro underground. He patched through to wire-based networks I’d never even heard of. He sent pulsed messages through urban power grids. It took time, but eventually we made contact. The Euro protes were living in hell.

Insurgent prote leaders had underestimated the will of the Coms. When work stoppages occurred, the managers simply shut down life support—leaving whole sectors of protes to suffocate in the dark. Food was scarce. Air was undependable. And almost everywhere, the water supply had been compromised. Old, old diseases, with sinister names like cholera and typhoid, were cropping up. Caught in a trap, the protes were beginning to turn against each other. There had been bloody battles.

Our friends Françoise Thou and Victor Bouille were still alive. I spoke to them. But Celeste and Rupert Chalotais, their three little girls, the Herbier brothers, and Uncle Qués, my old mentor in street crime—all dead. So many friends gone, I couldn’t even cry. All I knew was that we had to get the living ones out of there. We needed a major airlift. And we needed housing and doctors and food and clothing. I didn’t have enough money for all that. Listening to Victor Bouille’s thin voice through the static—it made me crazy.

My idea was to run a quick hack on the WorldBank, grab some funds, then buy a cheap car and fly straight into Paris and see what I could do. But another good friend, maybe my best woman Mend in the world, talked me out of that. Her name was Adrienne Stroebel.

Adrienne was another Euro tunnel rat like me. Only, instead of Paris, she’d grown up wild as a weed in Nether Berlin. When I first met her, Adrienne had been chopped down and brutalized so many times, you would have expected her to turn ugly and stunted. Not Adrienne. The hard knocks seemed to concentrate her beauty, and when Adrienne’s time came to flower, she produced the loveliest, fullest, sweetest-smelling blossom imaginable. At sixteen she escaped to Palmertown and landed a job as a model. You may have seen her in the Transkei fashion ezines. Tall, willowy, with huge azure eyes, lemony skin and a nimbus of frosty hair. She’s smart, too, my Mend Adrienne, but a little bossy.

“Jollers, we need a financial strategy.” It didn’t seem to disturb her that I hated that nickname.

“Adrienne, I have a financial strategy. The WorldBank. Half an hour on the Net, and I’m in.”

“Wrong, Jollers. Just shut up and let me take care of this. Our cause needs packaging. Poignant visuals. A stirring theme. I’ll stage a few small entertainments to seduce the bleeding hearts. I understand how these southerners part with their cash.”

She did, too. Adrienne hosted VR séances, hatha yoga chant-ins and other glam charity events. Plenty soon, she raised a pot of money. More Euro expatriates started showing up in our little office in midtown. Hundreds of people wanted to help. Next thing I knew, Luc was organizing committees and banks of Net nodes. Adrienne took care of finances. Jonas handled communications. Rebel Jeanne Sabot—my speed-freak pilot friend—Rebel Jeanne recruited pilots and set up a network of secret rendezvous sites in Euro.